In the Footsteps of Giants

Two sets of tracks define a relatively flat area of the trail, where wagons would run along side by side.

“There is no obstruction in the whole route (to Oregon) that any person would dare to call a mountain.”
Missouri Gazette, 1813 (This would represent the first indication of the decline and fall of newspaper reporting accuracy)

“The hills ware dreadful steep … locking both wheels and coming down slow got down safe oh dear me the desert is very hard on the pooor animals going without grass or water for one night and day.”
Helen Marnie Stewart, 1850

I'm with Helen in spirit as she and her family made the 2,100-mile trek along the Oregon Trail. Jo and I stood Sunday at the Snake River in Glenns Ferry, Idaho, looking across to the trail, still etched by the thousands of wheels that brought the prairie schooners down the hill and to the side of the river where the people had to make a decision: cross the swift-running Snake, using three islands in Idaho as stepping stones; or continue along the edge and into the desert where there was no food for their oxen.
Half of the trail trekkers crossed the river at this point. The rest pushed on, half of them losing their lives in the desert. There is said to be a grave every 80 yards of the trail. Ten percent of the 200,000 who set out never made it. Many lost all their goods in the river as their wagons were swept away in the roiling current. But still they came. The Shoshone Indian people saw them coming. They saw the dust of 1,000 Euro-Americans walking alongside their wagons.The wagons were something they had never seen before. And they saw oxen, something they had never seen before. And they helped them across the river. They showed them where the safest places were to ford. And the new Euro-Americans thanked them and befriended them. And then they took the Shoshone lands.
The Conestoga wagons used in the East were far too large for the Oregon trail. So the emigrants used smaller rigs, called “prairie schooners.” From a distance, their white covers looked like sails. There was no room to ride in the wagons.
There is an enormous emotional pull when you walk in the tracks left by these people. Perhaps it is because I am an immigrant, too. But I could feel the will, as well as the pain and the sickness and the daily struggle.
Overlanders got up at 4 a.m. The men hitched the teams and the women cooked breakfast over a buffalo-chip fire. The wagons rolled out at 7 a.m. At midday, they made an hour's “nooning” stop to rest livestock and eat a lunch of leftovers. At 5 p.m., the wagons rolled into a circle – not for protection from the Indians, but to form a corral for livestock. The men tended the stock while the women cooked a supper of cornbread. Beans. Fried meat, gravy, and coffee.
In the “Emigrant's Guide to California,” Joseph E. Ware advised emigrantrs tro supoply their wagons with the following items for a partyy of four:
824 lbs. Flour
200 lbs. Beans
725 lbs. Bacon
75 lbs. Coffee
135 lbs. Peaches or apples
25 lbs. Salt
160 lbs. sugar
200 lbs.lard
pepper
bicarbonate of soda
tin polates
spoons
coffee pot
camp kettle
knives
Total cost of these items in 1842 was $220.78

Isom Cranfill wrote these words in 1846:
“We arived at the uper crossing of Lewis River at 11 O'clock a.m. & commenced prepareing waggon beds to ferry over the River (verry Hot). We Ferryed Eleven waggons and their loading over the river. The wind blowed Severely in the forepart of the day & waves run too high to navigate the River. It was not quite to high in the Afterpart of the day & we Sucseded in Giuting over Safe & r\Riged up at 4 o'clock & set out on our journey.”

Shoes were a major problem for emigrantrs on the Oregon Trail. Mary Ellen Murdock Compton wrote in her diary of wearing out nine pairs of shoes along the route. The emigrants learned to barter with the Native Americans for moccasins.
One man turned terrible misfortune into a valuable commodity. Catherine Haun in 1849 tells how the man had a leg amputated following a rattlesnake bite. Rather than become a burden to others in his wagon train, he learned to mend boots and shoes while riding in the wagon.

The diaries of those to made it through bring this epic voyage alive.

“Father...died at the second crossing of Ham's Fork. We had two wagons, so mother had the men take the wagon bed of one of them and make a coffin. She abandoned the running gear, ox yokes, and some of our outfit, and we finished the trip in one wagon.”
Elvina Apperson Fellows, age 10 in 1847

“I would make a brave effort to be cheerful and patient until the camp work was done. Then starting out ahead of the team and my men folks, when I thought I had gone beyond hearing distance, I would throw myself down on the unfriendly desert and give way like a child to sobs and tears, wishing myself back home with my friends and chiding myself for consenting to take this wild goose chase.”
Lavinia Porter, 1860

Jo and I drove along Interstate 84 into Oregon, now called the Oregon Trail Highway. Our trek is a puny effort. It may be many miles longer. But it surely does not come close to standing shoulder to shoulder with those who came before, some 160 years ago. There are tears in my eyes as I look out across the rolling hills of eastern Oregon and see the deep-etched tracks that remind us of the five-month-long journey from Missouri to Oregon.